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A
I'm of the theory that the south won the Civil War. They didn't win the battle, they won the war. There's no doubt.
B
Bob, you and I have so much to talk about because you're not wrong.
A
You've reached American History Hotline. You ask the questions, we get the answers. Leave a message. Hey there, American History Hotliners. Bob Crawford here. Thrilled to be joining you again for another episode of American History Hotline, the show where you ask the questions. And the best way to get us a question is to record a video or a voice memo on your phone and email it to our website. That's americanhistoryhotline.com Again, we have a new website. We're no longer at gmail. We are now just American History hotline dot com. Okay. Today's question comes from Sheena in Wichita. She writes, I think a lot about abortion these days with the Dobbs decision and everything else that's going on. And I always wondered what women did in early America, like the 1700s or 1800s. Did women have abortions back then? If so, how did they do it? Sheena, that is a great question. And I personally have no idea this is anything about this subject, but I found the perfect guest who can help us answer your question. Joining Me now is Dr. Michelle Goodwin. She is a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown and the author of many books including Policing the Womb, Invisible Women, and the criminalization of motherhood. Dr. Goodwin, thank you for joining me today.
B
It's a pleasure to join you. And what an important question that was brought forward by your listener.
A
Yeah, I want to get to Sheena's question, but first, let's call out the elephant in the room. It's no secret that access to an abortion is, is an extremely divisive issue in American politics. Has it always been a political issue?
B
No. And to be honest, it's actually not a divisive issue if you think about it, because overwhelmingly Americans support the ability for people to determine their own reproductive futures. What has become divisive, and you are right, is the political space and it hasn't been. So let's level set at the most immediate level, which is Roe v. Wade. I mean, Dobbs is more recent than that, but I think Roe is an important part of the narrative and we have to get that right. So what does it mean to get an understanding of Roe v. Wade? Right. Well, it's to understand that it was a 7 to 2 decision and that five of those seven justices were Republican appointed. Justice Blackmun, who wrote, the decision in Roe v. Wade was put on the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. So that is really important because in the backdrop of these times, it could be understood, but really misunderstood to think that, well, the Democrats that support abortion and the Republicans don't. No, not at all. That was not it. And even 20 years after Roe v. Wade, in a case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe, and there were many cases in between that constantly reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, all five of the justices in the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey were Republican appointed. So now that's really important. So what happened, Right? Is this, like some big value shift? Should we really believe what Justice Alito then said in the Dobbs decision in 2022, that Roe was egregiously decided that these. That the Roe court was all wrong? Well, was the court all wrong later, 20 years after that? Right. And so you are right when you say that there is political dissension, but that political dissension seems to me a big letter P that we haven't had before. And I'll just add a couple of additional pieces to that to help underscore the nature around Roe and how both political parties thought of it as just basic common sense. So George H.W. bush, who was the first of the Bush presidents, led through Congress a campaign for Title 10. What Title 10 provides for is reproductive health care for the poorest of Americans. Now, that's the kind of stuff that Planned Parenthood talked about, right? So it's, you know, pap screens, it's breast cancer, ovarian screens, all of that, contraceptive access. And when asked about this, and Nixon, too, Nixon said, this is just basic health care. Right? So we've gone to big P, political discontent from what was just, this is just healthcare. And one other piece with that, too, sort of think about what has transformed as the Republican Party, which is a very interesting thing because George H.W. bush's father, Prescott Bush, guess what, was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood. So now we really have to ask, well, okay, well, what has happened? Because that's a whole lot of information that would suggest that there was just an equal playing board of understanding. This is just women's healthcare.
A
Yeah. The Bush family, famously from Massachusetts.
B
Yes, yes. Okay.
A
So, Dr. Goodman, I wanted to get into all of this. I was gonna do it later, but we're here now. Okay, so just tell me. We're gonna get to the 1700s and the 1800s, but now that we're here, what was that moment where it became politicized? What was the shift? We see this with guns as well. It's not always a political hot potato. It's not the third rail politics. Until it is.
B
Until it is, yeah.
A
Is it. Is it the Reagan revolution? Is it the rise of Jerry Falwell and the new Christian right? How does abortion become the hot. The. The division? I've known many Republicans who didn't want to vote for their candidate but for a.
C
But.
A
But for the abortion issue. So where was the switch?
B
So this requires that we think about what was taking place at the time of Roe and what our country was taking place. So 1971, 1970. Well, so 1973 is Roe, but leading up. So we have the Warren Court. So Roe fits in. There's one more case that I need to tell you about, and this helps to put it all in context about how extreme the difference is today. There was a captain in the military. She was a woman, Kathy Strzok, and she was pregnant. And to be in the military, this is right at the time of Roe. Her case was coming up to the Supreme Court. And what she wanted was to be able to stay in the military. She was pregnant, but guess what? To be in the military required that you had to have an abortion. You could not stay pregnant. And so she was being told, you must have an abortion, otherwise you have to leave the military. He said, well, no, I don't want to have a. I don't want to have an abortion. I want to be pregnant. I want to give birth. I want to stay in the military. She appealed nine times and lost. This was a case that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had hoped that the Supreme Court would actually take up. Because how could you say there couldn't be a right to an abortion when the military, federal government makes you have one if you are in the military. But this gives you some sense about where abortion was. But Falwell, you mentioned this, right? Like this moral majority around time a row, you have the falling of race discrimination laws. These race discrimination laws that had been on the books for decades as a pushback, a blowback against Reconstruction. And to really understand those laws that were Jim Crow laws, kind of post black code type of laws. People think about, you know, Rosa Parks and discrimination on a bus, but really have no idea just how pernicious and widespread the laws were, that only scratched the surface. It wasn't even scratching the surface that, you know, black. And sitting on a bus in the seat that you wanted to. You can't go through the front door of a restaurant. Guess what? You can't even be served in the restaurant. You can't play. You can't walk into the park, local park.
A
You can't.
B
You can't swim in the swimming pool in local park. You can't play billiards, can't play chess. Like all of these things that seem so absurd, like clearly this could not be, and yet they are. So for any of your listeners who'd like to learn more about that Pauli Murray and race codes In America, it's 800 pages, nearly single space, not her narration. You can just read the laws yourself. But the Supreme Court is striking down these laws. And the Supreme Court is also striking down these sex discriminatory laws that ban women from serving on juries, from being able to have credit cards in their own name, from being able to be trustees of their family's estates. All of this is taking place at the same time. And for a certain cohort of America, not the majority of Americans at all, but for a certain cohort of America, this is changing America in a way that dissatisfies them in a way that makes their politics vulnerable. It's a way of changing America that freely allows black people to vote. Let's keep in mind that the Voting Rights act of 1965 comes out of people being murdered. We have Mickey Schwerner, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, three young people murdered, bludgeoned, gunned down, and then their car driven into a ditch in Mississippi, 1964. Why these bright, beautiful young people? Because they want to register people to vote. So I know that's a large backdrop to the question that you asked about, well, when does this happen? Well, there are people getting upset. They're getting upset with all of these different things. And so that's one slice of it, right? This slice that is about the protection of an America in a vision that folks had from pre reconstruction. And to give you a sense of what old tied with new, there's something called replacement theory. We're hearing a lot about it today.
A
Yes, we are. In fact, there was a Washington Nationals baseball game yesterday where people hung a banner about white replacement theory from the stands of, of a Washington national baseball game. And so it is very much like I was going to ask you, in light of the overturning of Section 2 of the Voting Rights act that happened a couple weeks ago. You know, is this all of a piece? And it sounds like it is.
B
Yes, Bob, it is. And so what's old is new. So replacement theory, we're hearing about it now, but the first time that we were Hearing about it, because abortion was not always criminalized in the United States. The pilgrims were performed abortions even.
A
Dr. Goodman, just to interrupt you, just for our listeners who don't know, what is replacement theory?
B
Yes. So replacement theory is this notion that with the growth of non white individuals in the United States, this will replace white people. And basically it suggests that white people will lose social status, political power, et cetera, et cetera. And we first hear about this leading up to the time of the Civil War. This is why the first abortion criminalization laws come right up at the time of the Civil War and right after. Because the concern is that if black people are freed from bondage, that they will have children and their children will have children and perhaps their population will grow to such an extent that white people will lose the political power that they have. Famously, Horatio Storer, Joseph D. Lee, who were some of the doctors who were adding to this, wrote about, and here's almost a direct quote, that we need white women to spread their loins and go east, north, south and west. So it's not really about the sanctity of embryos and fetuses. It really has been seeing women as a political, as a useful political tool, as a useful tool in their reproductive capacities to just simply create more beings. And the presumption is that these beings will essentially vote white. And that is actually what is so troubling about all of this, is that it parades as we care about Constitutionalism, but it is actually anti constitutionalism. Because if we actually really care about Constitution, Constitution says we the people and we trust that people will be endowed with a right to be able to vote and that they will use that vote wisely to support candidates that want to advance constitutionalism. And what does our Constitution say? It says that we are all equal. Our Bill of Rights gives us a number of protections and it says that we have liberties and that we have freedoms, that we all have that and that we have birthright citizenship if we are born here. That's what our Constitution says. But what we see and what we saw with Falwell and then we saw with Reagan, which gets us to this kind of point today, are people who really don't believe in the principles of our Constitution and they fear it so much that now you see any number of things. The stripping away of the voting key protections in the Voting Rights act, aggressive pronatalism and rolling back reproductive freedoms, anti immigration that is so steeped up that we see Americans being gunned down in the streets of Minnesota and more.
A
It's a lot of context to get to a historical question, but it is important. Context, always. Context is so nuance. I always like to say. Nuance and context are always so important and can't be more important than on this very, very sensitive issue of abortion.
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A
Okay, Dr. Goodwin, I know American history extends well before European contact, but for the sake of focusing this conversation and getting to the heart of Sheena's question, let's go back to the colonial era. What were the norms and laws around abortion at that time?
B
It's such a great question, Bob. So, Sheena, people were performing abortions. They were performing abortions before they got to this land and established colonies. They were performing abortions inside the colonies. And Sheena, your question ties importantly to something else, which is that the majority of reproductive health care for women was performed by women. 99% of reproductive health care, the 1700s, 1800s is being performed by women. And you think about it, that makes sense. You know, 10,000 years ago, there are no guys with white lab coats and stethoscopes around their neck saying, let's do this. Reproductive health care for you. No, it makes sense that there were women that were doing that, in control of their own communities and bodies. And in fact, in Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun takes us on this historical tour and, and he tells us this. He goes back millennia. But he also talks about how abortion was not criminalized in the United States. In fact, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that these are private matters for people to deal with. Benjamin Franklin actually wrote a pamphlet about how to obtain how to perform an abortion. So it was not unusual, it was not uncommon. There were herbal ways of, of conducting, having an abortion. And that was knowledge that was, that was knowledge that was provided generation after generation. The majority of midwives that were in the United States all knew how to perform abortion. But there is a political aspect of this. And so we'll get back to the politics, which is that there's a kind of awful storm, if you will, that comes together at the period of time that's leading up to, to the Civil War. And much of the discourse about that is on matters of reproduction. And it's something that we don't talk about. You know, we sort of think about slavery as this awful enterprise. And it was of people picking cotton and that's bad enough and you're not being paid. But what the lawmakers at the time, the radical Republicans are fastening onto are a couple things. The horrors that are resulting after the Fugitive Slave Act. And they're fastening onto the reproductive servitude. They are making mention of the advertisements in newspapers that say Maria 14, has absconded with her two year old mulatto. Well, how. Maria is 14, she was 12. How did the child get to be mulatto? What are these things? And so you have Charles Sumner from Massachusetts giving speeches about rapes against little girls and about women. You have evidence from Thomas Jefferson. I mean, this is all so out in public that you have these radical Republicans that are just incensed by it all. Thomas Jefferson famously writes to other politicians saying that it makes no sense for them to stock their plantations with a bunch of men because the profit is turning on women and girls. He says you're guaranteed to bring in a profit every year or two from them. And he's not talking about how these girls just pick tobacco better than boys and men do. He's talking about something else. And so this perfect storm of the reproductive concerns of black women and girls is on the rise. You also have at the same time a profession that is just beginning. It doesn't exist before, which is gynecology. And the people who are claiming themselves to be gynecologists happen to be men. And this becomes a really important issue because the people who had been doctors before were actually called surgeons of anatomy. They were anatomists. And these folks would say, what is the point of an obstetrician or gynecologist? You're not doing anything different than women's work. And that becomes part of the kind of fire that is used in the anti abortion movement and leading to the Civil War. It is why the obstetricians and gynecologists try to band together with Confederates and those who would like slavery to continue to persist. And this is the reason why they are the ones that say they need white women to spread their loins east, south, north and west. And their rhetoric, though they lose the Civil War, they win in another way. Because by the time we get to the beginning of the 20th century, we go from about 99% of reproductive health care being performed by women to about 1%.
A
I'm of the theory that the south won The Civil War. They didn't win the battle, they won the war.
B
There's no doubt, Bob, you and I have so much to talk about. Because you're not wrong.
A
No, the ideology won the war. The ideology won.
B
You are not wrong. When you look at all of the concessions that have been made and you look at the way in which Jim Crow came about, I mean, we don't have a post civil War reality like Germany, Nazi Germany after the Holocaust, where they say, no, we're stamping this out. We want no more. We don't want to see a state statute. We will not name a street after you. We will not name schools after people who would do such grotesque harms in the name of our nation. No, not, we didn't do that. I mean, you have military bases that are named after people who are traitors to the United States. Schools, street signs, all the rest of this. And this kind of romanticization, we have not come anywhere near with saying the south that the Confederates lost. We kind of welcome the Confederate ideology into America today.
A
Let me ask you just to clarify here, in many Native American societies, before Europeans arrived, they also would have abortions, correct?
B
Oh, yes. The thing is, you know, what we've seen is so much narrative manipulation, if you will, around reproductive healthcare such that it actually distorts the whole history, disconnects us from women's bodies. And we see this at the Supreme Court too. So, yes, indigenous people performed abortions and reproductive health care more generally. Look, nearly 20 to 30% of pregnancies will end in miscarriage or stillbirth. Pregnancy itself is something that is alien to the body. Now, given narratives that exist, that can seem rather inflamed, and it's not. When we think about scientifically, what happens to most bodies that have a uterus is that there's bleeding every month. What is that bleeding supposed to do? Sort of wash away any potential for a pregnancy. It's a kind of strange thing, you know, within the body when it turns out that a pregnancy does take place. Pregnancies have been considered parasitic to the body. Now, again, all of that sounds really strange because of the narratives, the politicized, the political narratives that we've made around pregnancy. And we even see this. I want to name a case that is actually important to this. It's called Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. And it's a case that comes in 2014. It's a case before the United States Supreme Court after the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care act mandated that there should be no more pre existing conditions that would limit patients access to health care. It also provided that reproductive health care, preventative reproductive health care should be available. Well, Hobby Lobby, along with a couple of other corporations got together and said, you know, we don't want to have to cover certain reproductive health care. And one aspect that they didn't want to have to cover through their insurance providers were IUDs. But here's the interesting thing with the Supreme Court was the conflation of an IUD as an abortifacient. It's not a contraception. You know, IUD is just long acting contraception. An IUD will not give you an abortion at all. But here is another decision written by Justice Alito and he wrote the decision in Dobbs in 2022 that overturned Roe. And in that decision, you, you would think that an IUD is an abortion and it's not. So we even have at the Supreme Court the creating of mythology around what a pregnancy actually is. It's either complete ignorance on the part of what was the majority of the Supreme Court, or it's playing politics. And this politics of mythology around pregnancy.
A
Dr. Gobind, just to button up for a second before we move a little further for Sheena's question, the safety of abortions in the 1700s and 1800s, you know, I, I get it because like mid women were midwives. The, the women did the birthing, right? So it would make sense to me that the women would do the abortions as well. And so what was that germ like? You know, we don't have germ theory until the end of the 19th century. Like, like how was this kind of handled?
B
Well, let me say this. The women were far more advanced in understanding how to keep women safe and healthy. You see this rhetoric, this pushback against the obstetricians and gynecologists, they try to suggest that these women are, that they're not smart because they haven't gone to medical schools. But of course medical schools are discriminating against women and won't let them in. They say that these women are dangerous, but they're not. These women understand the importance of sanitizing. They understand the importance of washing their hands. These women are competing up against men who believe you don't have to wash your hands before you get involved with reproductive healthcare. And I suppose we shouldn't go any further before mentioning someone else, Marion Sims, who's considered the grandfather of gynecology and had a statute in Central park before it was taken down just a handful of years ago. And what's important about understanding Marion Sims is to get a backdrop of how little of consideration there was that men had towards women's bodies once they began in the space of kind of taking over. And Marion Sims kept at his home enslaved black women whom he experimented on for the purposes of developing gynecological tools. And these women, we know this from his autobiography, which I've read, and he would talk about getting an epiphany in the middle of the night. And when he would have an epiphany, he would grab his knives and his various tools and he would unchain. And it's horrible. It's a Frankensteinian story. And he would have anarcha and these other women lie on a table, and then he would cut into their bodies without any anesthesia. He had this theory that black women didn't experience pain. One can't imagine being awakened in the middle of the night by a person who's wielding a knife and then who cuts into your abdomen, giving you no pain relief. And doing this all under the guise that he. He's going to have reproductive tools that are made for the benefit of white women. It's all horrible. It's nightmarish, and it's a nightmare that has now been cloaked in something that, at least at the time was called medical professionalism. And the idea was that midwives were not professionals, but these were women who also lacked a certain political power. You realize women were not able to vote at that time. Right. So they didn't have representation. You had these new gynecologists able to join medical associations like the American Medical association. And you saw them wield their power with state legislatures to essentially ban midwifery. And so you go from caring and compassionate care, whether it was delivering babies, helping women to manage miscarriages, or performing abortions, or being there for women after stillbirth, to something that is radically different with these tools, with this sense of silencing women. And so much of that has remained. I mean, we are only now getting to the point where we have parity amongst women and men in medical schools. That's how devastating this has been.
A
Well, it seems like we get close to parity, and then things change.
B
That's a very good point that you make to that that you make, which is really important because in so many states, even though, as I've said, up to a third of pregnancies will result in miscarriage. And when you have a miscarriage, you need it to be managed, otherwise the woman could die. And a significant part of managing A miscarriage is actually an abortion. So imagine that we have states where law students are not provided training of how to perform an abortion. That's stunning.
A
We talked about Roe, Casey and Dobbs. Here we are up against our 250th anniversary. Do women today have more or less access to abortion?
B
Women today? It's a great question, and let me answer it in a bit of a nuanced way. Women have far less explicit legal access to an abortion today than they did 50 years ago. And what I mean by that is that there are women who may be able to obtain an abortion today throughout the United States with mifepristone and telehealth. But these are under incredibly arduous circumstances. After the Dobbs decision in 2022 which overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court said that these would be matters that would be taken up by the states. The states would get to decide whether an abortion would be permissible or not. This means that nearly half the states decided no. We're back to the question of did the south win? Because the majority of those states happened to be former Confederate. What this has meant is that women in Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, across the American south have had to leave those states essentially in order to be able to obtain the reproductive healthcare that they desire if they've not been able to somehow get mifepristone in the mail. What we have seen in states like Illinois, in California and Colorado and New York and other places are very long waiting times for people now to be able to obtain an abortion in person. What does it mean to get to those places? It means having to leave your home state, provide childcare. Most women who obtain abortions are women who are already mothers. So now it means that you have to take a day or two or several days off from work. It means that you have to provide childcare in that time. And it means there's exposure expense that is associated with all of this. And the backdrop of it is having to worry whether your state will try to track you to that other state. So even while in some of these states, like Louisiana has tried to criminally prosecute doctors outside of the state who have provided telehealth to women in the state, it is still incredibly arduous for the women in Louisiana, for the women in Texas. And I would be remiss to not share with you some of the stories that were post Dobbs. Immediately post Dobbs, we heard stories that were true. 10 year old needing to flee one state to another, pregnant from rape, not able to terminate that pregnancy in her own state. We have children now in elementary school, elementary school who are mothers because they're not able to terminate the pregnancy in their own state and their moms not knowing how to navigate these systems. We have had women having to gestate deceased fetuses, risking their lives because in their state, doctors concerned about potentially losing their medical license or being criminally prosecuted if they help that woman. We have seen patients bleeding out in parking lots of hospitals and clinics until they can be nearly, like nearly dead enough, sick enough before the doctors or the people at the hospitals who are the administrators figure that, okay, now we would be able to lawfully see you because you're at such a medical risk now of a staph infection or it's such a medical risk that you might die within the next 24 hours. Now we can treat you. We saw with the case of Brittany Watts in Ohio, a woman who saw medical providers three times who said, yes, you are having a miscarriage right now, but we worry if we provide help to you, that there could be significant fines, criminalization, punishments if we help you. She had a miscarriage at home, not unusual, but then criminally prosecuted afterwards with police coming to her home, busting up her toilet, trying to find through fecal matter. Sorry for the graphic nature of this fetal remains. This is the chaos that has been caused in the post Dobbs wake. And none of this is about human dignity, integrity, support for women rooted in science, rooted in health. None of that happens to be. And so while there actually have been in some states, more abortions post Dobbs than there was before, still there is just a horror of human dignity and that has been involved in this post Dobbs era.
A
It's a question that is so entangled in our politics that it doesn't feel like we. It is possible for us to get to the essence of it being a health issue. But I am so glad that we have you to help us better understand it and to better understand the history of it. I've been talking with Dr. Michelle Goodwin. She is a professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown University and she is the author of many books which I highly recommend, including Policing the Invisible Women and the criminalization of motherhood. Dr. Goodwin, thank you for joining us on American History Hotline today.
B
Thank you so very much for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure to chat with you.
A
You've been listening to American History Hotline, a production of iHeart podcasts and Scratch Track Productions. The show's executive producer is James Morrison. Our executive producers from iHeart are Jordan Runtal and Jason English. Original music composed by me, Bob Crawford. Please keep in touch. Our email is American History Hotline at. If you like the show, please tell your friends and leave us a review in Apple Podcasts I'm your host Bob Crawford. Feel free to hit me up on social media to ask a history question or to let me know what you think of the show. You can find me at bobcrawford Bass thanks so much for listening. See you next week. Foreign
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Episode: Was Abortion Always Controversial? From the Pilgrims to Dobbs v. Jackson
Host: Bob Crawford
Guest: Dr. Michelle Goodwin (Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown University)
Date: June 17, 2026
In this episode, Bob Crawford addresses a listener question from Sheena in Wichita: “Did women have abortions in early America, like in the 1700s or 1800s? If so, how did they do it?” To explore abortion’s history and its political and social context—past and present—Bob is joined by Dr. Michelle Goodwin, a leading scholar on constitutional law, reproductive rights, and author of Policing the Womb and Invisible Women. Their conversation covers the evolution of abortion’s legal, political, and cultural footprint in the US—from colonial times and the Civil War to the era of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision.
[02:04 – 05:42]
Quote:
“It was a 7 to 2 decision and that five of those seven justices were Republican appointed...Nixon said, this is just basic health care. Right? So we've gone to big P, political discontent from what was just, this is just healthcare.”
— Dr. Goodwin [03:07]
[05:48 – 09:05]
Quote:
“So Roe fits in...There was a captain in the military...to be in the military required that you had to have an abortion...She appealed nine times and lost.”
— Dr. Goodwin [06:50]
[09:05 – 14:56]
Quote:
“The first abortion criminalization laws come right up at the time of the Civil War and right after. Because the concern is that if black people are freed...their population will grow...white people will lose the political power…”
— Dr. Goodwin [11:59]
[19:02 – 23:56]
Quote:
“...the majority of reproductive health care for women was performed by women. 99%...And you think about it, that makes sense. You know, 10,000 years ago, there are no guys with white lab coats… Reproductive health care for you. No, it makes sense that there were women that were doing that, in control of their own communities and bodies.”
— Dr. Goodwin [19:25]
Notable Segment:
[23:56 – 25:10]
Quote:
“I'm of the theory that the south won The Civil War. They didn't win the battle, they won the war.”
— Bob Crawford [23:56]
“You are not wrong. When you look at all of the concessions that have been made...we have not come anywhere near with saying that the Confederates lost. We kind of welcome the Confederate ideology into America today.”
— Dr. Goodwin [24:15]
[25:10 – 26:15]
[28:12 – 32:25]
Quote:
“These women understand the importance of sanitizing. They understand the importance of washing their hands. These women are competing up against men who believe you don't have to wash your hands...”
— Dr. Goodwin [28:48]
[33:26 – 38:11]
Quote:
“We have children now in elementary school who are mothers because they're not able to terminate the pregnancy in their own state and their moms not knowing how to navigate these systems. We've had women having to gestate deceased fetuses, risking their lives...”
— Dr. Goodwin [36:17]
This episode is a deep, nuanced dive into how abortion was not always the flashpoint in American life that it is today. Dr. Goodwin provides a sweeping historical context, rooting anti-abortion law not in concern for fetal “life,” but in the maintenance of white patriarchal power—tracing this from colonial times through the Civil War, the medicalization of women's health, to the modern Dobbs decision. She consistently emphasizes that historically, abortion was a private, accepted, and largely depoliticized practice managed by women for women. Only with the rise of racist and sexist backlash, and the professionalization of medicine by men, did abortion become criminalized and stigmatized.
The episode closes with Dr. Goodwin’s sobering assessment of the post-Dobbs landscape—where legal access is narrower than at any other time in recent history, and where the shadow of historical inequities still looms large.
For listeners wanting a clear-eyed view on the real history of abortion in America, this episode is essential: factually rich, honest, and unflinching in its storytelling.